When the UK Smalltalk User Group started planning the Camp Smalltalk London event a few weeks ago, we imagined we might get 20 people. After only four days, 30 have signed up and we're jumping to figure out how many more people are interested and how many more we can handle. There are certainly worse problems to have!

Charles Stross makes some good points about the pros and cons of the iPad - his take on Flash is funny, but then I ran across this:

Secondary motive: I want to stay current. I have a bunch of O'Reilly nutshell books on Python. I would like to be able to open a terminal and run a python interpreter while I work through the tutorials. Ditto ruby, smalltalk, or whatever else I want to play with. The "no interpreters" rule in the app store gets right up my nose.

While average users neither know nor care about that rule, the tech influencers do care. I didn't think that mattered at first - which, given my role as a Smalltalk evengelist might be surprising - but I'm starting to think it will matter. As happened with PC's "back in the day", Android (or WebOS) tablets will eventually have a "good enough" user experience, and the open nature of them will matter. Apple lost that war once; they might be setting themselves up to lose a second time.

Nearly half (46 percent) of 18- to 25-year-olds spend as much time using online video services as they do watching TV, says RealNetworks. Research by online video software firm revealed that just under a third (32 percent) say the PC is their preferred platform for watching TV and video.

That tracks pretty well with what I see here - my daughter spends far more time with the net and video games (Xbox and Wii) than she does with TV. For that matter, so do I. I'm not entirely sure what changed, but over the last few years I've found TV to be less and less interesting. The only shows I really cared to watch on a regular basis this last few months have been Lost (now ended), Stargate: Universe, Dr. Who, and Fringe. There are other things my wife likes that I tolerate, but I don't much care about. My daughter is even further down that path; the only show I've seen her have real interest in lately is Dr. Who.

This will have a rather large impact on the standard TV/advertising model as the next decade unfolds.

Jeff Jarvis doesn't like what he sees in an FTC report on how to "save journalism". Like Jarvis, I wasn't aware that journalism needed saving; I am aware that there are (still influential) legacy players that want the field cleared of all those pesky new media types.

And people wonder why I'm skeptical about government. With "help" like what's being talked about here, who needs obstacles?

It took me a few days of separate efforts - buying the flowers, spreading the dirt, getting the trees delivered - and finally, getting new garden hoses, as a weed whacker seems to have done in the old one - but it finally all came together this morning. I have two photos below; if you're on Facebook, I posted an album.

On the one hand, you have people worried that Facebook is exposing too much, and not giving users enough control over the process (never mind Zuckerburg's quite clear mindset on where privacy is headed). On the other hand, Facebook is still growing, and Foursquare has a million people per day "checking in" - i.e., letting the world now the minute details of where they are and what they are up to.

And then there's the dark side of all this - how third parties are trying to use that glut of information to learn more about you - and doing so incompetently:

One day, Greg was called in to see his manager and was told that his services would no longer be needed. He was asked to clear his desk and escorted from the building with no further explanation. His family hadn't even finished unpacking from the cross-country move, and Greg was faced with the shock of unemployment.

Thankfully, after some pushing Greg was able to learn that the company had fired him because the subsequent background check had uncovered a criminal background and outstanding warrants the company was unaware of. Of course, Greg was also unaware of the criminal background and outstanding warrants because the company had uncovered information on the wrong "Greg".

That's the sort of confused privacy world we live in. People are exposing more and more of their lives to the world, are vaguely worried about it, but keep doing it anyway for the immediate (perceived) benefits. I'm not sure where that's going to end up, but it's going to be different than it has been...

"[Companies are] happy to stay with IE6 because ... a lot of the social networking sites and the sites that they deem are unnecessary for work purposes, they're not going to render and function properly within [older versions of] IE," Microsoft's Australian chief security adviser Stuart Strathdee said.

Can't say I've tried Facebook (et. al.) in IE 6 - I don't have it running anywhere. But seriously? With all of the security issues that MS has addressed since IE 6 with the 7 and 8 releases? Any IT department thinking that way needs to be outsourced...

We'll be live with Arden Thomas - Cincom Smalltalk Product Manager - at 2 PM EDT. We'll be talking about the upcoming product releases, as well as the roadmap looking forward. If you have questions during the talk, just throw them at us via the chat channel on the streaming site, or over on the Smalltalk IRC channel

Not only did CBS cancel what was often Friday night's top-rated series last week, but ABC decided not to give it a shot either. In fact, things have gotten so bad for Jennifer Love Hewitt's veteran series that CBS has decided to can the summer reruns and move the renewed Medium and its reruns into the 8/7C p.m. slot for the summer months.

My wife likes that show, but I think it started to stray when it tried to explain the ghost world too much. Medium does a better job of just working on "if this were possible, how would it play out in the real world"?

So you take the wild premise,but then just run the world normally, but with that premise. Ghost Whisperer tried to do too much explaining. Never mind the killing of the husband, followed by the complete ignorage of his reinstatement in someone else's body, along with the "many years later" trick of having the kid grow up.

Sources said several large media companies, including Time Warner and NBC Universal, told Apple they won't retool their extensive video libraries to accommodate the iPad, arguing that such a reformatting would be expensive and not worth it because Flash dominates the Web.

Well - the Flash war won't end anytime soon with that news. That certainly leaves a space for HP (Palm) and Google, if they can create compelling tablets. Of course, that's a big if. The interesting thing that's not mentioned: Microsoft isn't even part of this game...

Microsoft squashed the rumor that Ballmer would appear at Apple's WWDC event - and the way they did it is more interesting than the news itself: they tweeted it:

"Steve Ballmer not speaking at Apple Dev Conf. Nor appearing on Dancing with the Stars. Nor riding in the Belmont. Just FYI," the tweet said. The company, however, has no plans to support Objective-C, a Microsoft representative said.

Steve Jobs gets the message out via email, and MS is doing the same sort of thing via Twitter. Somewhere, PR professionals are crying, since their jobs are the ones getting disintermediated.

Engadget reports that Microsoft is expecting to sell 30 million Windows 7 phones by the end of 2011:

We've got to hand it to Microsoft -- when it sets a goal, it really sets a goal. As you can see in the slide above shown during a ReMix event in Paris yesterday, Microsoft is apparently expecting to sell 30 million Windows Phone 7 devices by the end of 2011, based on IDC projections

Umm, how? The phone doesn't exist yet, Apple and Google have well defined products, HP may be breathing new life into Palm, and Microsoft is deeply, deeply confused about their integration story - how does this new device fit in with the XBox and Zune, for instance?

It turns out that when the complete Lost series is released on DVD, the set will include what Emerson calls an "epilogue" that will focus on Ben and Hurley protecting the Island in the post-Jack era.

"It's 12 or 14 minutes that opens a window onto that gap of unknown time between Hurley becoming number one and the end of the series," Emerson told host Kevin Pereira. "It's self-contained, although it's a rich period in the show's mythology that has never been explored."

So... the flash sideways was the post life before they could move on, but the island story was real. It's all very confusing :)

Engadget reports that the iPhone is pretty much "wide open", so far as accessing data goes:

Bernd and fellow security guru Jim Herbeck have discovered that plugging even a fully up-to-date, non-jailbroken iPhone 3GS into a computer running Ubuntu Lucid Linux allows nearly full read access to the phone's storage -- even when it's locked

This is why the meme about Macs being secure, while Windows is insecure has been so flawed. I do believe that Unix is a better basis for security than Windows, but - Apple has mostly gotten by on a "security via obscurity" model - Macs are still rare enough (in percentage terms) that it's simply not worth bothering with them. There are so many Windows boxes that it's just better target environment for bad actors.

However, over in mobile-land, things are different. iPhones are very common, so having this kind of vulnerability is the sort of thing that could end up giving Apple some real PR issues.

Unlike Apple and Amazon, bookselling behemoth Barnes & Noble didn't have an e-reading app available for the iPad on day one. But it's just released an iPad version of its eReader

My wife was happy to hear that - it opens up another catalog of books for the iPad. While there are some luddites around claiming that print is better, I don't think that's the issue. This is an additional channel for reading, not a replacement. It will work better for some kinds of reading, and less well for others (I'm thinking textbooks in which you might want to annotate or highlight). Bear in mind though, most of us stop using textbooks after the age of 21 or so, so trumpeting that lack as a key problem is kind of narrow-minded...

People have been telling Ruper Murdoch to put up or shut up for awhile - meaning, if he really thinks that "Google is stealing his content", he should just use robots.txt to cut off access to his news sites. Well - it seems that he's going to try that experiment:

The papers, which plan to start charging users for access to their newly redesigned Web sites in late June, will prevent Google and other search engines from linking to their stories. Although they are not the first papers to erect pay barriers around their content, the papers are going a step further by making most of their site invisible to Google's Web crawler. Except for their homepages, no stories will show up on Google.

I have no idea how they expect anyone to find their material after that. It's not like the old days, when you would walk out, get the paper off the driveway and browse - now you find things via:

Search

Friend referrals (Twitter, Facebook, etc)

Automated Search (Google News, Yahoo News, etc)

RSS/Atom (not the mainstream, but a lot of influencers)

Notice what's not on that list - directly visiting the site. Oh sure, there are people who go to media sites directly (I'll go to the NY Times for baseball coverage, for instance). But I don't think it's the primary way it happens. Within a month, I expect that traffic will drop off precipitously at these outlets, and Murdoch will end up executing a painful climb down from his idiotic "Google is stealing from me" mindset. It won't just be painful though; it will be costly. Whatever rates he's getting for ads now will plummet with the traffic levels.

When you look up the phrase "bad plan" in the future, you'll run across an item about this as the prime example...

Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with tiny Global Equities Research, contends that 7 minutes of the June 7 keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been blocked off for a presentation by Microsoft to talk about Visual Studio 2010, the company’s suite of development tools. Chowdhry says the new version of VS will allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone, iPad and Mac OS. And here’s the kicker: he thinks Microsoft’s presentation could be given by none other than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

If that's true, it would be a very visible turn about. Even if it's not true, you have to consider where Apple is in the most relevant space (mobile) compared to MS right now. Apple is in the lead, and MS is busy rearranging the deck chairs.

An iPhone port of GNU Go is currently being distributed through Apple's App Store. However, this distribution is not in compliance with the GNU GPL. The primary problem is that Apple imposes numerous legal restrictions on use and distribution of GNU Go through the iTunes Store Terms of Service, which is forbidden by section 6 of GPLv2. So today we have written to Apple and asked them to come into compliance.

That's from the FSF. They go on to say that they expect Apple to drop the app from the store rather than comply; that's how I'd bet. I also wouldn't be surprised to see the SDK development rules updated to forbid GPL code....

It's easy to blame Facebook for a lack of sufficient privacy controls, as Bruce Nussbaum's students apparently do - but seriously - if you post lurid details about yourself on a website you don't control, you shouldn't be shocked when other people find out:

Then Gen Y grew up and their culture and needs changed. My senior students started looking for jobs and watched, horrified, as corporations went on their Facebook pages to check them out. What was once a private, gated community of trusted friends became an increasingly open, public commons of curious strangers. The few, original, loose tools of network control on Facebook no longer proved sufficient. The Gen Yers wanted better, more precise privacy controls that allowed them to secure their existing private social lives and separate them from their new public working lives.

To some extent, that's like keeping a highly personal diary, and then storing it on your front porch. Sure, the porch is your property - but it's not exactly private. I sure don't have any illusions about how private something I put on Facebook (or any site I don't control) is - I run with a default assumption that "anyone can see it".

Acting otherwise is simply naive. Nussbaum's students have been smacked by reality. They may not like it, but they need to get used to it.

Engadget reports that Comcast is starting to rollout 105/10 service. That's interesting, but expensive - they have a mandatory $250 installation charge, followed by a $200/month bill. Meanwhile, my mid tier FIOS service is 25/25 - and it looks like Verizon also has a 50/20 service for $140/month. I'm not sure that's worth it to me yet, but if they start offering faster service, maybe it will be. At least there's some level of competition in my area.

With how little I drive, an electric car might actually be worthwhile for me - assuming that it could be recharged in a reasonable time period. That's where this article about "faster" charging made me wonder. Consider:

Most Level 3 stations are considered “fast chargers,” but they don’t have to be. The conventional wisdom is that if an average EV battery can be charged to full in about a half hour, then it is a fast charge.

Which tells me that electric cars, at least with the technology available now, are useful for... maybe people like me. Now, how many drivers fit that profile? I don't know, but even for light commuters (my wife drives around 15 miles one way), it's simply useless. Why? Right now, a car trip doesn't have to be plotted out. If you notice you need gas, you pop into a station, and you leave 5 minutes later. With electric cars? Well, you better plan on staying wherever you are for awhile when you charge (the "fast" chargers are still awaiting standards, and the next level is an 8 hour wait).

I just don't see that working out very well for most use cases. Sure, you could use it for short trips - but heck, for less money, a hybrid or regular car will do the same short trips and also let you go as far as you want.

Update 2: In the comments, it was proposed that instead of recharging stations, we simply have battery exchange stations. Well. There are two problems with that:

At least at present, there are no standards in this area - a Tesla battery won't work in a Leaf, or vice versa

The Leaf battery is 600 pounds. That's not a simple drop in/replace operation. Never mind the storage requirements for the supposed exchange station - any station about the size of a current gas station will run out of space quickly.

Robbie Bach and J Allard, founding fathers of Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices Division, are leaving the company as part of a broader restructuring that will give CEO Steve Ballmer more direct oversight of consumer businesses including Microsoft's struggling mobile unit.

Especially with Ballmer running things. He's like a one man morale destruction machine...

The UK Smalltalk User Group would like to invite everyone to attend Camp Smalltalk London this July 16-18. The Pharo team will be holding one of their regular coding sprints and, in true Camp Smalltalk spirit, other Smalltalkers will be gathering together to do some productive work on their projects. In addition, we want to welcome those who just want to learn more about Smalltalk, so we'll be holding an introductory tutorial on the first morning. We'll have you writing Smalltalk by lunch! If there's interest, we'll follow up with a Seaside tutorial the next day.

Sounds like fun - and Cincom is hosting a dinner at the event. Follow the link for details.

One thing I've noticed about the newer plot driven video games - you really need to run through them at least twice. Two cases in point - Fallout 3
and Dragon Age: Origins
. I played both games extensively after I first got them, but I missed tons of stuff - not just side quests, but lots of things that could help with the main plot (in fact, I never did finish the first character I created in DAO). With Fallout, I finished the main plot, but left the rest of the world largely unexplored.

On the subsequent plays, I took a lot more time - heck, I maxed my character to level 30 (I have the Game of the Year edition) in Fallout before I even started the main plot. By that time, I had enough custom weapons that I was taking Raider attacks as boring events that my dog could mostly handle on his own :)

This is quite different from most movies (at least for me). There are some movies I like watching again - LOTR comes to mind. For the most part though, it's one and done. First person shooters are mostly like that for me. The plots are linear, and you just run down the track. What I really like are the larger games. I'm running through Mass Effect
now, and will play ME 2 once I finish that.

On a humorous side note, I'm getting a lot more play time since I got a toe injury that makes jogging painful. I'm behind on my podcast listening, but the funny thing is, I get a lot more exercise. An hour passes very easily on the exercise bike while I'm playing a game :)

Twitter has decided on (shocker), an ad model for revenues. The fun part is their terms of service, where they want to shutdown anyone else doing something similar on Twitter:

In cases where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale, we require you to compensate us (recoupable against any fees payable to Twitter for data licensing).

But what does that even mean? You could classify my Smalltalk posting as advertising for Cincom, and I do a lot of that (take the daily screencasts as the prime example). I post them here, the posts get auto-tweeted, and then the tweets find their way into the Facebook news stream. How does that get classified by Twitter?

What about the book reviews I do, where I put in an Amazon affiliate link? I don't get paid for those reviews (and the affiliate links don't pay either), but it could be called advertising. What if I actually reach the monthly minimum at some point and get a check from Amazon? Does that count?

Smalltalk seems like a good environment for learning better OO design, but it makes you wish Java or whatever you’re using were as fast, easy and simple. Apart from the libraries, there isn’t much difference in capability, yet the one is so much simpler and more expressive. It also makes me hate Gosling a little bit more. If the only thing he took from Lisp was garbage collection, and he took the single-inheritance idea from Smalltalk, he’s an a******because Smalltalk also has garbage collection. It’s like saying you have a dish that incorporates Thai and Greek cuisines, and that the Thai aspect was using chicken.

The company gave a sneak preview of the new Telepresence terminals at its Cisco Networkers event in Cannes in February. The system will retail at around $500, a far cry from the six-figure sum that businesses expect to pay but probably higher than was expected.

For $500, you won't be getting a life sized video wall. If I want a video chat on my TV, all I really need is a cable. So... I have no idea what Cisco will be offering that will deliver more value than what I have already.

With the end of the series, it's time to figure out what the ending meant. From the final conversation between Jack and his father, one possible interpretation is that they were all dead, and this - it was like the final scene from
Saint Elsewhere
. So let's look at that notion.

The last scene - where Jack is stumbling in the jungle, and falls down - that was right after the crash (in 2004), where Jack has survived, but not for long. Then the camera pans over the crash scene (no remnants of a settlement). So... combine all that, and you get the following:

They all died in the original crash

Somehow, the people who were brought together in the church at the end had a "shared consciousness" thing going, where they constructed the entire reality

Desmond bringing them to the church at the end represented all of them finally coming to terms with their deaths

In that sense, the "alternate reality" was simply another escape from what had really happened to them

So... you can go all Matrix on that. There was no boat, there was no magic island, there was no man in black or Jacob. There was just a crash, followed by a collective refusal to accept death - and the series was that set of people living out a different reality than death, with the final episode bringng them to acceptance.

I'm not sure that's how I wouldve gone about ending it, but that's how it went. It was all a dream.

While the essays in the early part of the book were quite good (and I touched on that in my earlier post), the case studies were perhaps the most illustrative things. Why? Partly because Brooks does what far too few of us are willing to do - ponder oversights and mistakes made during the design process and how they impacted later use. That came up both in discussions of his beach house (which he was a co-designer), and of the IBM System/360.

After any major deliverable, I think it's worth taking stock of what happened and why. As well, these words from Brooks (in the context of the 360) make a ton of sense for any real system:

Allow plenty of time for design. It makes the product much better and useful longer, and it might even make delivery sooner by reducing rework

Two large examples from the history of VisualWorks come to mind: VW 2.0 and VW 5i.0. In the first case, what came to be known as the ObjectLens (and O/R mapping framework) was brought in from the outside by marketing, and then an additional year of development work was done in order to make it minimally deliverable. No on at PPS (or the successor owners) was ever happy with Lens - in fact, the original developer of the code had left engineering, and been allowed to take the code with him - partly because no one in engineering had much faith in it. That code has been problematic ever since, and is only now being replaced with something better (Glorp).

VW 5i.0 was rushed for management reasons - there were bad numbers about to come out, and management wanted a release "to soften the blow". 5i.0 was not even vaguely ready for release; Store was unstable, and the (then new) namespace system still had kinks in it. It took two releases from the new owner (Cincom) before the 5i line was minimally usable, and, to some extent, things didn't really stabilize until the 7.x release line.

Those were both management failures as well as design failures, but - a willingness to spend more time on design, and less on "quick fixes" would have been better for everyone. That's one of the major lessons of the case studies, at least for me. Overall, I liked the book - it's accessible to anyone who's associated even loosely with design, and makes high level points without going off into the weeds on any of the examples. I highly recommend it.

This week's podcast features our Product Manager, Arden Thomas, at one of this year's world tour events. In this podcast, Arden sketches out a WebVelocity use scenario. As I mentioned last week, the 1.1 beta is coming soon - if you're interested in taking a look at the beta when it's ready, send me an email.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

To listen immediately, use the player below:

If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Effortless for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!

my point is that I needed some simple caching of a method's results to help a page load a little faster in Seaside. All I did was add a new instance variable to my model instance that lazy-loaded the result of the calculation. I then added a few more places where this "cache" gets invalidated from other method calls, and I'm done. I didn't have to install gems, configure a new server like memcache, read docs on a gem's interface to memcache, etc. I simply leveraged the tools available in Smalltalk, and built a simple thing that just works. I don't have to worry about persisting it as its lazy-loaded. Which really is how memcache is usually used with Rails, as a place to temporarily store the results of an expensive computation

Yeah, adding a caching scheme to a Smalltalk web app is pretty simple. It's one more way that having an image makes things easier - and not just at development time.

Well, we know Lost's upcoming series finale is big, but this big? Countries around the world are planning to simulcast the airing of ABC's Lost 2-1/2 hour series finale, "The End," at the same time as the U.S. West Coast broadcast

That's something you don't see every day :) Still - that leaves the east coast ahead by three hours, so there's still the chance for spoilers.